(Thanks to XKCD for the comic!)

Language seems deceptively easy. Every day, we read thousands of words and have plenty of conversations without any trouble. But peruse an academic paper by a computational linguist (scientists who attempt to map out all the rules that govern how our speech and writing work) and you’ll quit taking these rather complex skills for granted!

Children soak up spoken language effortlessly and without much formal instruction – their gurgles become full sentences as quickly as their crawling becomes sprinting. By comparison, fluency in written language is regarded as a more hard-won (even unnatural) skill. Learning to read requires repeated, focused practice! We parents place great importance on our kids’ mastery of the written form at an early age, so it’s no wonder why there are so many products designed to help children learn to read (think Hooked On Phonics, LeapPad, Speak and Spell, etc).

Once they move beyond babbling, kids start saying words and observing how their parents react. They conjugate verbs to make longer phrases, at first incorrectly like “I runned over here” or “I goed to school”, then they learn which ones are irregular and get them all right. That explains why kids’ first knock-knock jokes are non-sensical - only later do they figure out what makes a real punchline. Continued »

Credit: Simon Grieg

As part of our series Sifteo and Thinking Skills, every week we’ll be reviewing a different skill that serves as the foundation for Sifteo’s Intelligent Play Platform. We start today with Spatial Reasoning.

You’re undoubtedly familiar with the children’s puzzle where the goal is to fit a round peg, a square peg and a triangular peg into their respectively shaped holes. As adults, completing this challenge seems like – well, child’s play. But if you observe children playing with this toy for the first time, you’ll notice a lot of trial-and-error in which they learn through direct experience where each peg fits, and where it doesn’t. They’ll learn that the triangular peg drops easily into the triangular opening, but not so well into the circle or square. Through successive attempts, they understand and mentally associate the pegs’ shapes with the shapes of the holes.

This is spatial reasoning. Simply put, it is our ability to understand and mentally manipulate the ways that objects relate to each other. Continued »

Here at Sifteo, we’re committed to building an Intelligent Play platform that provides engaging and social gaming experiences for all ages. Whether you want to enjoy casual tabletop games with your friends, or you’re a parent of a young child who’s ready to explore her letters and numbers, Sifteo is creating the next generation of interactive gaming to provide countless hours of fun, while enhancing our thinking skills and helping us see our world a bit differently than before.

Over the past several months, we’ve been analyzing what types of these thinking skills we tend to practice and develop through various play activities – be they casual or competitive, team-based or solo – and furthermore, what types of skills are honed through interacting with Sifteo cubes.

We want to take the next few weeks to discuss various thinking skills that serve as the foundation of Intelligent Play. In these primers, we’ll elaborate on why these skills are important through every stage of our lives, how they translate into real world activities, and how they’re manifested via Sifteo games. Additionally, we’ll also highlight historical trends and influential people who’ve helped define how we think about the intersection of play and learning, and how they inspire us to create unique experiences with Sifteo cubes.

Every Thursday, we’ll review a new thinking skill here on the Sifteo blog. But we’ll kick off the series tomorrow morning with Thinking Skill #1: Spatial Reasoning – a skill that we pay little heed to, but one that  is absolutely critical in understanding the physical objects – and the ideas – that we encounter every day.

Engadget ran a piece by Donald Melanson earlier this month called “A less tactile future, and how to avoid it.” Noting that mobile phone design is trending toward glass slabs and glossy plastic bodies, Melanson argues for the “goodness of the physical feel” – the goodness that design features such as flip-phone mechanisms, physical buttons, and organically-inspired textures bring to consumer devices.

We agree! Although fingers are really good at tapping on touch-screens, our digits are what they are because of our human history spent with (non-electronic) physical tools, which typically have some texture and get moved around during use – think bows-and-arrows, hammers, scissors, ping-pong paddles, wood working tools (see above image), etc. We are programmed to be sensitive to the weight, texture, and motion of the objects we handle, so it makes a lot of sense for designers of new interactive devices to borrow from this history and incorporate tactility into their work.

We are exploring a new point in the tactile design space with Sifteo cubes, inspired by play-oriented objects like alphabet blocks and dominoes. Although Sifteo cubes have a glossy exterior, the style of interaction – moving little objects around with both hands – is a tactile experience that’s more physical than a touchscreen. We also made the whole top surface of each cube into a mechanical button, because we like that feel.

As we design the hand-tools of the digital age, it pays to keep the lessons of our hands-on past in mind!

Developers and enthusiasts working to bring their Sifteo cubes ideas to life

The Sifteo SXSW 2011 Hackathon was a lot of fun! We had a great crew of developers and enthusiasts who joined us and spent the afternoon wrapping their heads around our alpha cubes SDK to build and demo their application ideas. Participants built apps for musical play, outer-space chemistry, competitive strategy, speed and reaction, and more!

Thanks again to our friends at Silverton Partners for hosting us, the space was awesome, and it was fun to imagine all the entrepreneurs that have pitched at the table where we hacked the afternoon away!

Sifteo will be in Austin, TX for SXSW, and we’re hosting a Hackathon! Come join us to check out Sifteo cubes, build some apps on our system, and meet some of our team. We have 15 slots on a first-come-first-served basis.

→ RSVP ONLINE ←

WHEN: 11AM to 6PM on Sunday, March 13, with introductory overview sessions at 11AM and 2:30PM

WHERE: Silverton Partners office, 1000 Rio Grande St (corner of 10th & Rio Grande), Austin, Texas 78701

• Hackathon #1 – This will be our first hackathon, so we’d love to get feedback on the current “alpha” SDK.
• Python! – We’ll be developing our apps in Python. Though our API is pretty easy to get started with, we recommend you come with a little Python knowledge, or at least a little programming experience.
• Free lunch! – Yep, we’ll feed you.
• Legal stuff! – Note that there will be a Developer Agreement you’ll need to sign off on in order to access the docs and use the SDK.
• Cubes for the winner! – The creator of the best game will receive a truly fabulous prize: a set of Sifteo cubes of your very own to develop on! The winner will be selected by the Sifteo game team after the event, results will announced on our blog, and we’ll mail the prize cubes.
• Maybe even get your app published?! – We’d love to share your creations and get them into the Sifteo app store on launch, so if you’re interested to write games for our system, come on by.

Thanks to our friends at Silverton Partners for hosting! Space is limited, so sign up online soon!

No time to hack?

Sifteo will also be at the SXSW Accelerator and Plutopia 2011: The Future of Play.

• SXSW Accelerator is an innovation competition for startups featuring lightning-fast pitches and judging by a panel of experts that is open to all badgeholders. Detailed schedule and location information here.
• Plutopia is an evening of “interactive installations, performances by world-renowned musicians / artists, talks, art exhibits, compelling projections, DJs, demonstrations, performance art, robots,projections, gaming fun, locally produced, artisanal food and beverages, and much more” (from plutopia.org, $15 admission, and you can buy tickets in advance here)

See you in Texas.

On Thursday we hosted 20 students from Carnegie Mellon‘s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) Silicon Valley Program, as well as CMU ETC faculty Don Marinelli, Jiyoung Lee and Carl Rosendahl. These masters students spend part of their time “embedded” at Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, where they have their own workspace and do coursework towards their degree. At the same time they can interact with EA people and experience what it’s like to work in a top-notch video game company. Sounds like a great experience!

The students checked out our latest demos, getting a peek at our take on the next wave of social, tabletop gaming. For those of us at Sifteo, it was a chance to make contact with a group of smart people that will be the next generation of creative+technical game builders. We talked about the capabilities of Siftables and the game mechanics that they uniquely enable. We’ll keep in touch with this group going forward — thanks to the students and faculty for visiting!